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October 2008 - Posts

Thursday, October 30, 2008 11:16 AM

Interactive Geometry Tool

The Live Geometry project is “A computer model of plane geometry that allows you to create interactive ruler and compass constructions and experiment with them.” Looks very cool to me. I can imagine lots of ways for teachers and students of geography
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 8 Comments
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 10:43 AM

Teachers Sharing Projects

It’s no secret that one of the things I think is most valuable about teachers blogging is that they can share ideas for what works in the classroom. Good teachers are always either looking for or struggling to come up with projects that teach important
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 27, 2008 6:01 AM

Tech Talk Tuesday For Teachers

I got a lot of “T” words in that title. What I found this week was a whole calendar of videos and presentations created by the “ Microsoft in Education ” team that are aimed at teachers, Tech Coordinators, and others involved in using computer technology
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, October 23, 2008 8:23 PM

Announcing Small Basic From Microsoft DevLabs

Do you remember the old days of learning how to program with a simple, easy to use, uncomplicated version of BASIC? A lot of people including a lot of teachers (and more than a few professional developers) do. But in general companies are working on more
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, October 23, 2008 6:15 AM

What Does This Code Do?

“What does this code do?” is often a bit of a gotcha sort of question. OK sometimes it is a simple thing to make sure a student understands the syntax but many times it is really asking if the student understands some underlying concepts of either the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 6:12 AM

Talking Points – Information About IT Careers

A friend forwarded the following announcement to me the other day. This is a really good resource for high school and middle school students about careers in Information Technology. It’s aimed at girls so don’t tell anyone but I am showing it to boys
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 6:02 AM

C# Yellow Book

Looking to learn or teach C#? Rob Miles announced that the C# Yellow Book which “ is used by the Department of Computer Science in the University of Hull as the basis of the First Year programming course” is available as a PDF file. I went and grabbed
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 20, 2008 5:55 AM

NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing 2008

I received this announcement through Facebook the other day. If you know a girl with aspirations in computing and Information Technology tell her about this. Pass it on to your Guidance Department as well. Online applications are due December 1, 2008
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, October 17, 2008 5:36 AM

Free E-books on Visual Studio 2008 and MS Robotics Studio

Microsoft Press is celebrating their 25th Anniversary with some free e-books. Two that may be interesting to educators are one on MS Robotics Studio and one on Visual Studio 2008 . These offers expire on October 22nd so act now. And tell others who could
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:40 AM

Surface Technology Development

One of the hottest new technologies in computer interfaces is Microsoft Surface which uses multi-touch to allow several items (like hands for example) to control things happening in software. The hardware for this is a bit expensive. OK it’s a lot expensive.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 5:50 AM

Learning How to Use Silverlight

Have you heard about Silverlight ? Have you ever wanted to learn how to use it yourself? If you haven’t heard about Silverlight I borrowed some text from the Silverlight home page to explain it. Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, October 13, 2008 10:10 AM

Kick-off the Northeastern Girls Collaborative Project with a day of networking

I received this from the event organizers who asked me to pass it along. Looks like a good event. I think I’m going to try and make it myself. Are you from NH, VT, MA or RI, and are you working to get more girls involved with science, engineering, technology
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, October 13, 2008 5:44 AM

Video Games As Educational

Last week Microsoft announced a large investment in research into educational games . There have been a lot of educational games over the years. Some of them I think have been educational in theory more than in practice. Others more accidentally educational
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Friday, October 10, 2008 5:09 AM

Friday Links 101008

I have a small backlog of interesting links so I decided to group some of them in this post. Some are different from what I usually post and some are more typical. But I think they are all interesting to someone who is likely to be reading this blog.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, October 09, 2008 6:01 AM

In Praise of Small Colleges

Following in the footsteps (sort of) of Bill Gates, Craig Mundie is making a fall college tour. He’s visiting Princeton University, New York University, the University of Michigan, University of California-Berkeley, and UC San Diego this week. YAWN! No,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 12:32 PM

Beginner Developer Learning Center

One of the questions I get all the time is “ I have a student/child/nephew/daughter/etc who wants to learn programming on their own. Where should they go?” My answer is always the Beginner Developer Learning Center and from there to the Kid’s Corner .
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 5:54 AM

How to Build an Academic XNA Game Development Laboratory

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has one of the best game development programs in the US if not the world. Recently the team there put together a document that explains some of there key learnings setting up a development lab for teaching with
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, October 07, 2008 5:59 AM

Visual Basic .NET and C# Side By Side

Recently Clint Rutkas and I has some fun discussing which was better between C# and Visual Basic .NET. Truth be known I’m perfectly happy using C# even though my first instinct is to use VB .NET. I do believe that VB .NET is better as a first language
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 06, 2008 6:18 AM

Teachers, Trust, Teaching and Filters

So long time readers know that I am not a fan of filtering of the Internet in schools. My wife is a librarian who enthusiastically marks Banned Books Week every year for the chance to discuss censorship with her students so its a family thing I guess.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Sunday, October 05, 2008 7:39 PM

Remembering Grace Hopper

A good number of people I knew were at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing last week. By all reports it was a great event, some cases of altitude sickness not withstanding. Hilary Pike has been blogging about it over at Springboard . I
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
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Friday, October 03, 2008 9:24 AM

Education is a Journey

My Dad was and is a stickler for good table manners. he always insisted on them at home while we were growing up. One day I asked him if we couldn’t just be messing at home and do everything right when we were out in public. He explained that it was about
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
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Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:31 AM

Intersection of Computer Science and the Rest of the World

What good is computer science anyway? How does it help anyone understand the world around them/ Good questions both. And in the last few days I’ve seen several good answers. Those are not directly the questions the blog posts I found were addressing but
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 01, 2008 5:20 AM

How Central Is Programming to Computer Science

Computer science educators are fond of saying that computer science is a lot more than just programming. Programming has a bad reputation. And in some ways so do those of us who find programming to be a lot of fun and very interesting. So there are some
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
 
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